The Immortal Life of Akira Howard
by PlaidButterfly
Summary: He'd told himself that if he just did this, if he just confessed, if everyone hurried up and started hating him - it would be a relief. It would be such a relief. He had to tell her, before he lost his nerve. (In which Akira Howard has a long overdue conversation with his sister, in the post-game events.)


"I'm just _saying_," Alan King grumbled as he leaned on the wall and crossed his arms, nearly hiding the Neuron emblem on his uniform, "I got fewer headaches when I thought Captain Max's nickname of Chatterbox for his daughter was _ironic_. "

"Well, I think it's lovely," Marie replied quickly. She even looked up from her mopping to grin brightly before bringing the sopping mop back down with a wet slap. "I mean, it's not like she was quiet all this time because she really wanted to be!"

"No, it was because she nearly flunked out of the police academy…"

"For talking too much! Right!" Marie beamed happily up at him again, seemingly oblivious to the sour expression on Alan's face. "So sure, she talks a lot, but it's because she's finally let her guard down! And I think that's lovely. I mean… she's been through so much. _We've_ been through so much. Doesn't she deserve to feel at ease with us?"

Alan didn't reply beyond looking away quickly from Marie's innocently searching expression, settling for a _hhmph._ underneath his breath. "Yeah, well…" When he spoke again, obviously off to a shakier start, he glared over his shoulder down the hallway instead of looking at Marie. "Maybe my head would hurt a little less if she at least stopped _singing to her legions_ when doing maintenance on them."

"But it's so cute!"

"It's not cute when you hear _the wonderful thing about tiggers_ for the seventeenth time in a row! I don't even know what a tigger _is_, and I'm sure the Beast Legion doesn't either," he huffed. "If she was just in-tune for any of it, it wouldn't be SO bad, you know?!"

Marie finished making one last long arc with the mop before putting it upright in the wheeled bucket, and looking at Alan with a pout. "Really? You think that she sings that bad? That's a shame… I guess you're not going with us to karaoke night on Friday, then," she sighed, shaking her head, before continuing on in the subtly coy tone of the dangerously self-aware ingenue. "Since we're doing a planned duet, with costumes and everything, and it takes a lot of fuss to get into that little pleather corset… Oh, well, if gives you headaches, then it can't be helped!" She shrugged and started to wheel the mop and bucket away, holding the mop's handle in a soapy parody of a punter guiding his boat down a stream. "I guess we'll just have to send you a picture and drink a toast to you, right? Maybe I'll figure out how to wear the same outfit for Halloween, since I'm sure you'd want to see it, what with all those little buckles making it so tight and all…"

Alan took a few minutes to catch up as she wheeled the mop past him. In fact, given the shade of red his ears were turning, it was fairly likely any passers-by could hear the sound of his brain trying to work after the spanner of Marie-in-a-corset was chucked into the gears. And even if it took him a few moments, he did turn around and start dashing after her. "W-wait, wait! It's not - uh, it's not that bad, listen, I'm sure after a beer or three…!"

And from behind a pile of boxes, sitting just outside the freshly-mopped floor, Akira Howard slowly gave a long sigh of relief.

He didn't really know why his first instinct was to hide. He wasn't sure about most of his instincts these days, if he had to be totally honest, but hiding was particularly strange. All of these people - all of Neuron - were his friends, his colleagues… Why had he felt the need to duck behind the boxes and stay quiet until Marie had finished mopping up that spill? It was just one more thought in a muddled tempest. He barely looked elsewhere than his own feet as he walked down the hall, past the command room and the familiar soothing sound of typing. For a brief moment he wished it was something as straightforward as a headache. That would at least be a point of focus. Or maybe a distraction. He wasn't sure. There was enough roiling anxiety to create a steady haze, anyway.

Right. Deep breath. No point in putting this off any longer, he told himself firmly. He'd decided it would be today, and he'd spent all morning putting himself through the hell of nervous anticipation. Now or never, and it would be now, because he'd promised himself it would be _now_. No more delaying it. Not even because everyone was being so kind. _Especially_ because everyone was being so kind.

The clinic was mercifully empty, aside from two of the other researchers. He rapped a knock on the open doorway anyway. "Uh, Dr. Moreno? ...Can I talk to you a minute?" He saw her straighten in her chair before spinning around and smiling at him, yet never quite making eye contact. "In, uh… in private, if that's okay."

"Of course, take all the time you need," one of the researchers said, nodding to the other. "We were just about to go take a coffee break anyway, right?" Both of them smiled at him on their way out.

It only made the gnawing anxiety in the pit of his stomach worse.

The door closed behind the two as they left, and he suddenly became aware of how his hands were shaking. Brenda couldn't look him in the eye - as usual. At her fingernails, at her datapad, at his tie, anywhere but his face. He cleared his throat, and the words seemed, for a long moment, stuck just behind his teeth, not ready to tumble out of his lips yet. He forced them out anyway.

"I, ah… I just - I wanted to tell you -"

"Please don't."

Her voice shook. He didn't think he'd ever heard her voice shake before. Brenda still could not look at him, and her gaze flitted from his uniform, the nametag on it, and then up - she closed her eyes instead of looking in his, even as she held out a hand as if asking him to stay silent. He obliged as she reached out to grab her water from her desk, staying quiet. The liquid swaying in the bottle - her hands were shaking, too, just like his, even if he was digging his fingernails into his palms in tight clenched fists to try and make it less obvious.

"I know what you're going to say," she said. "I already know. It's… It was good of you to tell me. But I think your sister deserves to hear it first, don't you?" Her voice came as close to cracking before she drew in a sharp breath through her nose, steadying herself. "She's up on the roof, having lunch. Could you take these to her as well, please?" Brenda reached over for another datapad, offering it out to him. Her smile was tired and careworn, but he appreciated that she was trying, at least. "And ask her when she'll be finished with those summary reports? ...Thank you."

He didn't quite know what to say in response. A mumbled affirmative as he took the datapad was good enough.

Maybe if he walked fast enough to the elevators, he could outpace all the anxiety. It didn't work. Maybe if he looked up at the elevator ceiling, he could will it away. Maybe if he bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, maybe if he held his breath -

Didn't work.

He stood in the elevator for a few moments even after the doors opened. His fingernails had cut half-moons into the meat of his hand - just red, no blood yet, but as he flexed his fingers and clenched his shaking hands once more, he wasn't sure how long that would last.

He'd told himself that if he just did this, if he just confessed, if everyone hurried up and started hating him - it would be a relief. It would be such a relief. He had built himself up to one height, and it was only getting worse, with Brenda's non-answer. He felt sick, like he could cry, like he could scream -

There wasn't any use in doing so.

Keep on walking. One foot in front of the other. Before he lost his nerve.

One of the other officers on break said something to him; he didn't notice enough to hear what was saying. A blast of fresh air as the doors opened out into the helipad. Distant laughter - the drone pilot crew were sitting out having their lunch, and someone had just told a joke. He only had eyes for one thing, and one thing alone - the woman sitting to the side.

Bright red hair made a natural beacon. Between the ginger hair and freckles, Delia Howard always looked different from her brother. The facial similarities were still there, of course, but natural red hair was rare enough on the Ark that it made Delia unmistakably recognizable from the first. She was eating her lunch perched on the side of the roof, legs dangling off the ledge with impunity that can only really come from someone who had their Legion summoned and knew with absolute certainty that if they tipped forward, it would drag them up to safety with barely more effort than a thought.

She picked up another bit from the bento box in her lap. "Carrot stick, D'artagnan?" Her sword Legion looked somewhat unimpressed. "Aw, c'mon, Darty, I made sure they were in here just for you…" The Legion seemed to relent, delicately taking the carrot stick between its speared claws and holding it near its face. The idea of a Legion eating was absurd, but it seemed to do something close enough to approximate it - as long as you didn't look too close and were content to see the carrot stick dissolve in a flash of blue light, absorbed into energy. "Attaboy!" Delia looked behind her, grinning wide and waving. "Heya, Akira! Come sit! You had lunch yet?"

"Uh…" He gulped, running a hand through his hair. His other hand was still gripping the datapad from Brenda, knuckles white. It was hard to stand in the glare of her boundlessly optimistic smile. After all, she'd been kindest out of all of them. Her anger at being betrayed would be a relief, he told himself firmly. It would be a relief. No more putting it off. "Actually, I need to… talk to you for a minute."

"Sure! C'mon, sit down. Darty'll grab you if you go overboard, promise." Delia cheerfully patted the concrete beside her.

"I don't know if you're going to want me to," he blurted. "I mean, after I…" Well. Too many words coming out at once was the opposite of the previous problem. Don't look at how she was smiling still, even with gentle concern. Don't look at how she tilted her head a little in confusion. He closed his eyes tight and kept on going. "I'm not - I'm not…" Shit. All tangled up again. Deep breath. Start over. "I'm not your brother. I mean, I - I sort of am, but - I'm not him. I'm not the real Akira. I've just been -" He nervously ran a hand through his hair again. "Everyone's been so nice and kind and it, it was easier to just - if I just went along with it, but I'm not him, I'm _not_, and I've just been taking advantage by being a fraud and, and a _monster, _and I'm sorry, I'm so _sorry_ I just -"

"It's okay. I know."

That was not the answer he had been expecting.

Delia patted the ground again. "Come sit down. ...Have you had lunch yet? I packed some extra, if you haven't." Her voice wasn't as shaky as Brenda's, but he still caught her reaching up to rub her eyes lightly as she looked over to her bento box.

The knot of anxiety in his stomach wasn't truly starting to lift yet, but he dutifully sat down. Her sword Legion gave a crooning sort of cry, moving to let him in and settling in on the other side of him, almost protectively, as if shielding him from the wind. He tucked his legs underneath him, unwilling to let his legs dangle off the side the way she had done. "Here. I know spam musubi's not your favourite, but it's the garlic stuff, so tolerable, yeah?" She smiled at him, even as he searched her face, trying to understand why the smile was there at all. "C'mon, take it." She almost forced it into his hands before he finally assented.

"...How did you know?"

She shrugged, with a little sniff. "The first time I called you 'little bro' and you didn't blow a gasket and bite my head off about how you were born _four whole minutes_ earlier," Delia said, trying to smile as if it was a joke, but not completely covering up the sadness. "Dad taught us - well, Akira and I… Anyway, he said his two rules for detective work were pretty simple. You ask the right questions, and you don't lie to yourself. ...Don't lie to yourself, not even if you really, really want to."

"Oh," he said quietly, looking awkwardly at his lap as he still held the datapad, and then out to the skyline. "If… if you want to kill me now, I understand. It's okay. I mean, it's what I probably deserve."

"No way in _hell_."

He looked over to her as she wiped at her eyes again, staring out at the skyline. Delia was doing an admirable job of trying to not let on that she was getting weepy, at least. "But… the things I've done -"

"You showed up and did your job. I can't be mad at you for that."

"But taking over somebody else's life - even - even Dr. Moreno knows!" He paused for a minute, startled at how loud he had gotten, and looked over his shoulder in momentary paranoia. Nobody else was looking in their direction - good. "She can't even look me in the eye. She _knows_ I'm some sort of monster, and -"

Delia reached out to touch his arm.

It was such a friendly, familiar gesture that it caught him off-guard. Even now she was content to treat him as a brother, as her brother, in the smallest of ways. Her tone was as gentle as her touch. "Brenda didn't explain what's on that datapad, did she? What reports I'm summarizing for her?"

He shook his head no.

"Okay. Eat your musubi, and I'll explain a little." She pulled the datapad out of his lap, tapping on it to pull up a browser for a general query as she talked - but paused and looked at him. "No really, eat your musubi. You'll feel better after you eat something." Despite the churning nervousness in his stomach, he relented, and took a bite. (Surprisingly good. At least, a lot better than potted meat and rice wrapped in seaweed would have seemed at first.) "So, Brenda… she told me awhile back - she's a doctor, so she had to go through these ethics courses. A lot of med students consider it sort of bullshit formalities, y'know? And she did at first, too, until they got to this one case." Delia's fingers flitted over the touchscreen, inputting a search query, pulling up pictures - and finally selecting one. A black and white photograph, blurry and at low-resolution, of a dark-skinned woman in a matching skirt and jacket. She was smiling at the camera, hands on her hips, bangs curled to frame her face. "Way, way back - you probably guessed it from the photo - like, before the turn of the millennium, there was this lady. She got cancer, and her doctor took cells of that cancer, and it became one of the very first human cell cultures to work reliably in lab settings. Absolutely instrumental to progress, y'know? I mean, they had barely figured out the structure of DNA at this point, so there were huge leaps and bounds of knowledge to make. But the thing is - nobody asked her permission. She didn't even know what had happened. She died, and she didn't give her consent, and neither did her family. They didn't know until all of this had already happened. Eventually, someone told them, and they worked out compensation for the family - scholarships in her name, and stuff like that, too. But when Brenda learned about this, she told me that she made a promise that she'd never make that same ethical mistake. She told herself she'd never become the sort of monster who has to ask for forgiveness after the fact."

"That's…" He paused, finishing swallowing his mouthful. "It's an interesting story, but I don't see…"

"Brenda didn't tell you what was on the datapad, right?"

He shook his head no, looking her in the eye - surprised that she was willing to make eye contact, even. She nodded quietly, accepting his answer, before looking back to the datapad.

Delia's voice had been fairly steady before - quavering a little, but just a little. Now it teetered on the edge of breaking as she fumbled with the words as if they were hard to face and harder to say. "What's on the data pads is… well, when they made - you, I guess, and all the other clones of my brother… There were some… extras. Some spares. Not just functional clones, but, s-some… some for… parts. So as they're clearing out the old labs, they've found all of them. Not… functional. Brenda explained it to me that they're not meant to live on their own. Nothing developed beyond basic brain stem. Just… y-you get the idea. Anyway -" She paused to wipe at her eyes, taking a deep breath, steadying herself.

She flicked at the datapad, bringing up a picture.

"Brenda told me that this is… Well, a lot of it is based on her old research. Before she joined Neuron, or became aware of Chimeras, she was working on a problem of donor organs. The Ark's got limited genetic diversity, and limited population, and that's only going to get worse over time. Sometimes lab-growing something will take too long, or the artificial replacements are clearly worse. So you've got to work out how to grow some organs that will be a good fit for _everyone_. True markerless universal donors. She did some pretty groundbreaking stuff. Like, awards and everything - she just doesn't display them. Anyway, it's… what got used for the… spares. Why they make good spare parts. And what's on the datapads is… well, it's how everything's getting used."

She tapped the picture again, bringing it into clear view. A child in a wheelchair, holding a Lappy balloon. The kid was smiling even bigger than his parents around him.

He felt his tongue loosen in his mouth as he put the pieces together. "Oh. So this…"

"Tobias Sandoval. He was born with a deteriorating genetic condition, and gene therapy wasn't taking. So he needed a new kidney, and…"

"And he was able to get one, from… one of the clones, like me."

"Yeah. Exactly." She flicked a finger across the datapad. Another group of smiling people, an old man in the center in a hospital gown, but his granddaughter in his lap. "These are all the reports of people who have been able to live, because those… brain-dead clones exist. Because they were made for spare parts." Another group. A young woman kissing her fiancee, after pairing her hospital gown with a bridal veil. "Every single one of them, because Yoseph used Brenda's research. Because Yoseph decided to make an army of clones." Another group - and another, and another. All of them smiling, laughing, crying with happiness at being alive. "And for Brenda, it's just… well, it's why she can't look at you, just about."

He frowned. "...I don't think I get it."

"It's because it's exactly like that woman I showed you at the start. Nobody asked permission. Not from Akira, not… well, you can't really ask permission from someone grown in a vat without anything more than a brain stem, right?" Delia reached out to gently pat his arm, even though this meant he could see the tears starting to collect in her eyes. "She doesn't think you're a monster. She thinks she's the monster, because she wasn't able to stop all of this. She feels responsible, and like it's her job to ask forgiveness."

"Oh," he said softly. It was too hard to look at her in the eye, so he settled his gaze on his arm and her hand on top of it. "So she doesn't hate me. And… you don't hate me, either?"

"Of course not. I mean, Akira knew he couldn't leave me behind. No way I can afford the apartment we've got on just one police salary, yeah? And besides, somebody's got to nag me into doing the dishes."

She was trying her best to joke. He knew that, and he almost felt something within him slide into place to recognize what was happening. A sunny smile to paste over all the genuine pain and fear was what let her keep going. A joke, no matter how dark; a laugh, because it was better than crying. If she faltered for a moment, just a moment, after placing the world on her shoulders - if she fell, what would fall with her? So best to keep smiling -

And underneath all of it, the real and vicious grief of a twin who didn't know how to go through life alone.

The tempest of worry in his chest seemed to quiet almost all at once. Perhaps the winds hadn't stopped fully blowing, but the whirlwind suddenly ceased, and he felt blessedly able to breathe once more.

"We should get you another name, though," she said, reaching over to ruffle his hair. "I mean, if you're feeling too guilty about being called Akira, which is pretty understandable. I'll find where Dad stashed our baby book, yeah? There's a whole big list of names - Dad just found it in our Mom's pocket, she didn't really get a chance to explain much. It's why I'm Delia Noriko and you're - I mean - why… why he was Akira Thomas. Just picking the first two of the lists. Anyway, there's a lot more. Plus nicknames. What d'you think about Ace, maybe? Pretty plausible nickname, right? Nobody would bat an eyelash at you deciding to go by it, I bet…"

"Ace sounds… pretty good, actually." He paused to pop the last bit of spam musubi in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.

"Could even do something with your hair, too." Delia paused before continuing on, making it plainly obvious where the nickname Chatterbox came from. For other people, it would have been a sign of anxiousness, worry of death by dead air, but from her it seemed far more playful. Silence might be doom, but only in the same way that the floor is lava when jumping from couch to chair. "Oooh, y'know, I keep seeing these hair dying kits and wanting to try them out, but then you have to condition your hair after and everything, and I don't know what color I'd like because I'm already a redhead y'know? But you'd look really cool with, I dunno, maybe a streak of blue - maybe the same kinda blue as the uniform - all matchy-matchy, and it'd seem like something Ace would do…"

He reached up to rub the back of his neck, almost out of nervousness, and she pulled her hand away from fussing with his hair. "That… sounds nice, yeah. ...I know people don't really get the chance to ask this," he said, taking his time to choose his words, and thankful that she was giving him silence to do so. "And… I didn't really have time to think about how to say this, because, um, I thought everyone was just going to hate me. But… I know I'm not Akira. And I'll never be your big brother." He paused, taking a deep breath. "But, um…"

"If you're asking if you'd like to be my little brother, if I'll let you, then the answer's yes. Always yes." Her voice actually cracked properly at this, even as she reached up to wipe some of the tears away, as if trying to hide them.

He answered her by reaching over and pulling her into a hug. And she hugged him back with near-crushing tightness, even as she sniffed like it was going to cover up her getting weepy enough to not be noticed.

"Especially," Delia Howard warbled out, "if you'll do the dishes so I don't have to." And he couldn't help but laugh.

He hadn't expected to have a sister that loved him after the end of that conversation, but Ace thought he could probably make do.

* * *

((author's notes:

hello, folks!

i don't know how far i'm going to get with writing a collection of one-shots for astral chain, or what will happen next. i'm, alas, still disabled, and still fighting with constant pain. (turns out your shoulder doesn't like it when your body grows a bunch of bone spurs and tries to saw itself in half. who knew?) this is, yet again, not going to be up to what i consider my usual standard. it's _incredibly_ frustrating, but it is what it is. please be reassured once more that i'm not abandoning Masquerade or other projects. and please, please, if you possibly could, be mindful that there is nothing more disheartening for a disabled writer than people clamoring to treat them as a source of free entertainment, and obviously not giving a damn about them beyond their function as a fanfiction machine. as the meme goes: Give A Bitch A Break. with that whinge done, i will say a sincere and heartfelt thank you to people who _don't_ do that. even if i haven't had the spoons to reply to every comment or PM, i still see them and appreciate them very much.

doom and gloom entirely aside, thank you for reading! hopefully the good winds will continue blowing long enough for me to do a few more one-shots, and i can annoy all of you not with the lack of output, but with seeing a near-silent protagonist, promptly going _it's free real estate_, and filling my fics full of nonsense like "every single legion gets a silly name and cutesy nickname variant because delia noriko howard will not be stopped".))


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